WHILE IT WAS once the UK market which we tapped into in Ireland to try and save some money on our used cars, the story has very much changed.

Brexit was supposed to be a headache mostly for people bringing in second-hand hatchbacks from Liverpool and Holyhead. What nobody quite predicted was where all those cars would be replaced from. The answer, it turns out, is Japan, and the shift has been so total that it’s worth explaining properly, because I don’t think most people buying one of these cars actually understand what they’re getting or why it got here.

The scale of the change is genuinely startling.

Back in 2019, the UK supplied 95% of all the used cars imported into Ireland, more than 108,000 of them in that year alone. Japan, by comparison, was a rounding error, just under 5% of the market.

Roll forward to the first half of this year and the picture has flipped entirely. UK imports have fallen to just 14% of the total, while Japan now accounts for 55%, comfortably ahead of every other source combined.

New analysis from DoneDeal Cars, based on official SIMI registration data, shows that in the first six months of 2026 alone, 33,065 cars arrived here from Japan, against just 8,475 from Britain. Total import volumes have surged regardless, with almost 60,000 cars arriving in the opening half of this year, a pace that would beat any full year since 2020.

Cóilín Garvey, general manager of The Automatic Motor Car Centre in Lusk, has been importing from Japan since 2013, long before it was fashionable, and he watched the shift happen almost overnight.

“Brexit was probably what really kicked everything off,” he told me.

“The additional VAT on UK cars slowed down imports of non-VAT-qualifying cars. That created a huge opening for Japanese cars to come in.”

Cóilín Garvey, general manager of The Automatic Motor Car Centre in Lusk

Before that, he said, Irish importers from Japan were mostly bringing in older, slightly oddball models, the Aquas and Vitzes and Jazzes of this world, because the UK still had plenty of similar stock going cheap. Once VAT was slapped on that older UK stock, the automatic Golfs and Polos that Irish buyers wanted simply stopped being economical to bring in from Britain. Japan filled the gap.

John O’Connor, owner and director of O’Connor Car Centre in Cork, put it just as plainly.

“We wouldn’t be able to fill this garage without Japanese imports,” he said. He gave me a concrete example: a BMW 320d Touring, brought in from the UK versus one sourced from Japan.

“It wouldn’t even be worthwhile bringing one in from the UK. There’d definitely be a €4,000 to €5,000 price difference.” And that’s before you factor in what he called the reconditioning bill.

UK imports, he said, used to cost two or three grand to sort out before they went on the forecourt. A car from Japan costs a quarter of that. O’Connor Car Centre’s Cork has cars from a budget-friendly 2019 Nissan March with just 29,000km on the clock up to high-end BMWs from the Japanese market with no shortage of takers and customers on a busy Friday morning in the showroom.

Here’s the part that surprised me. The assumption most people carry around is that a “Japanese import” means a Corolla or a Civic. Actually, the single biggest make arriving here from Japan isn’t Toyota at all, it’s Volkswagen.

The Polo - one of the most imported used cars from the Japanese market

German premium models, sold new into the Japanese domestic market, made up 63% of all Japanese-sourced imports last year, with Volkswagen alone accounting for almost 11,000 units. What’s coming off the boat in Dublin and Cork is as likely to be a German car with a Japanese service history as anything built by Toyota or Honda.

So why are these cars in such good nick?

Both Cóilín and John pointed to the same thing: a strict roadworthiness test in Japan called the Shaken.

Once a car hits around three years old, it has to go through it, and it gets more expensive and more rigorous every time after that. The system effectively incentivises Japanese owners to trade in relatively young, low-mileage cars rather than keep patching up an older one.

“The turnover of cars in Japan is massive,” Cóilín said. “These cars are low-mileage and in really good condition, but people trade them in, they’re exported, and the owners start again.”

He mentioned finding bits of memorabilia in cars that come through, business cards and the like, with some arriving with the factory plastic still on the radio screen or door-sill emblems.

John reckons there’s a cultural dimension too.

“I think it’s the culture over there,” he said.

They look after their possessions and take pride in what they have.”

Whatever the mix of regulation and culture, the result is a car that’s often years younger in condition than its plate suggests.

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Then there’s the sheer choice.

Cóilín’s dealership buys through auctions running six nights a week, with roughly 30,000 cars available on a given night across the auction houses they use. They only bid on a small fraction of those, and buy an even smaller fraction again, sticking to a minimum auction grade of four.

“The number of cars we can choose from is almost incomprehensible,” he said. Even with tens of thousands of imports arriving here every year, both dealers pointed out that Ireland is a minor customer on the world stage, competing for stock against Australia, New Zealand and, increasingly, the UK itself.

At AMCC specifically, the growth since Brexit has settled into a steady pattern, Cóilín says, of roughly 500 cars imported a month, month on month. Around 70% of what’s currently arriving is full electric, plug-in hybrid or self-charging hybrid, and the vast majority of stock is now 2021 or newer.

John O'Connor, owner and director of O'Connor Car Centre in Cork.

It isn’t entirely without friction. Every car needs new tyres, since Japanese rubber isn’t EU-rated, along with a new radio or head unit, since Japanese systems often won’t take European software or maps.

VRT appointments, John told me, have become such a bottleneck that his staff have travelled as far as Westport to get one sorted. Electric imports come with their own quirks too, different charging connectors that need an adaptor, and crucially, no manufacturer battery warranty once the car has left Japan.

There is one wrinkle in the environmental story.

UK imports have become dramatically cleaner as buyers chase the least heavily taxed stock, average emissions there have dropped from 91g to 65g of CO2 per kilometre. Japanese imports haven’t followed the same path, remaining overwhelmingly petrol and hybrid, with emissions barely moving. Weigh the two together and the average imported car’s emissions have hardly changed at all, even as the source of that car has been completely rewritten.

If you’re shopping for one, Cóilín’s advice is straightforward: don’t be wary just because a car came from Japan, but do your homework regardless. Ask for a Car VX report using the car’s VIN, the Japanese equivalent of a Greenlight history, and ask the dealer for the original auction sheet showing the grade the car was bought at. Any dealer worth dealing with should hand both over without being asked twice.

DoneDeal Cars is your home for good quality Japanese import cars, and you can filter in the Ownership and History section of the site by country of origin under Japanese Import. The evidence would suggest that the quality of these cars is worth considering.

One note of caution, some of the lower-end Japanese cars don’t come with engine immobilisers and this can cause some issues for insurance companies, but this aside, they might make a good buy for you.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.